Some people would say they are lucky, other would say the are plagued by unluck. Is this true, in real life? What magical forces of the universe would bestow one individual with luck and another with bad luck? Is this just a myths about human life that we could ask the TV-Myth-busters to demolish?. Oddly enough, the English psychologist Richard Wiseman, with a reputation as a scientific myth-buster, says that there is some truth in this. Some people actually have, empirically, more luck than others. But there is no magic, blessing, or cursing involved. On the contrary, lucky people are simply using different ways of thinking and behaving. These behaviours, among other things, invite benevolent change and increase the possibility that they will notice and take advantage of chance. Interestingly, If this is the case, then it might be possible to extract these behaviours and teach them to un-lucky people. When the unlucky person behaves, and thinks, like a lucky person, there luck might change.

I will, in a series of four blogs, discuss how Wisemans findings fit with a solutions focused approach, and how the approach actually is something of a luck school in it self.

(BTW, the first thing to notice is that Wiseman’s luck school idea in itself is an example of the solutions focused approach. One of the central ideas of SF is: find out what works, and do more of it. Wiseman extracts what seems to make people lucky, and then teaches other people to do more of that. This is similar to the Positive Deviance approach to foreign aid.)

Wiseman described the four factors of an article in Sceptical Inquirer (May/June, 2003)

Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition,create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

In this blog, we’ll look at the first principle: Create and notice chance opportunities

Wiseman conducted an interesting experiment. He gave lucky and un-lucky people a newspaper and asked them to count the number of pictures in it. What he didn’t tell them that there was a message on page two of the magazine saying “Stop counting - There are 43 picture in this newspaper”. The lucky people tended to see this message and was done in a few seconds. The unlucky people spent several minutes working to count the numbers. The luck here was not a matter of chance. It was a matter of awareness. The lucky people, without realising it, used a technique we can learn and develop: our ability to notice the unexpected and pattern-breaking, and not to get locked down in tunnel-vision.

In solutions focused work we often use techniques to help us notice change and possibilities. A classical technique often used in solutions focused therapy is easily adaptable to a small everyday experiment:

For the next few days, notice what you do, and what happens, that is good for you, and that you want to see happen more. Make a note of it in the back of your head or an paper

The idea of exceptions or, as I prefer to call it hidden success is another tool that works with this principle. If a solutions focused coach is asked to help a team with co-operation problems he or she might use a question like when was the last time you co-operated well or better After an initial suprise people often recollects moments of success hidden among the problems, like Wisemans message among the pictures. Often, we are too busy with problem (or counting) to the the fragments of success that give us clues to solutions. When we have identified such hidden success, we often follow up with affirming questions like How did you manage to do that? Which helps us to build on what works.

An experiment you might like to try is:

Think back on the week until you find something that you did, or that happened, that was useful for you. Then ask yourself how you made that happen. How did you do to take the opportunity? What did you learn from it?

With the solutions focused approach we can increase our possibilities in the moment and in the future by noticing the chance opportunities that always happen. We can also use the past by using our lucky eyes to pick up the possibilities that was lying in front of us, but we were to busy to notice or that discounted by view them as exceptions. This increases our possibility-field to include the unpredictable changes that always happen.

In the next blog in this series we will look at the third principle: create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations. There are also some ideas on luck and chance in a previous blog